"Of course it'd happen in the UK first," said the veteran American Jewish peace activist. "They create a diverse – however temporary – coalition, and get a major newspaper to do their publicity for them. We'd never be able to pull something like that off here." For anyone involved in Israeli-Palestinian peace advocacy in the US Jewish community, such statements were all too common as word began to filter out about the emergence of Independent Jewish Voices (IJV) last year.

Already familiar with the work of a number of the contributors to the IJV series being published at the time in The Guardian, my colleague concluded rather glumly: "It's not like we don't have the same drive. The American Jewish left is just too factionalised, and will never get similar support from mainstream national media." The activist's words held particularly strong significance for me, having just stepped down after two-and-a-half years as the managing editor of the US Jewish left's original flagship publication, Tikkun.

Ever since the height of the conflict in Vietnam, American Jews have sought to connect the dots between their liberal politics and their relationship to Israel. Following every major Middle East war there had been a number of attempts to create similar organisations to IJV, none of which achieved any reasonable mass until the early 2000s, when my former employer helped create the Tikkun Community, and other likeminded activists founded parallel national organisations such as Brit Tzedek veh Shalom and Jewish Voice for Peace in light of the collapse of the Oslo process, and the intensification of the settlement enterprise in the occupied territories.

In nearly all these instances, what resulted were small, frequently unstable, yet increasingly influential political groups that both reflected and sought to further alter thinking within the US Jewish community about Israel's treatment of the Palestinians. Generally taking the resumption of the peace process as their primary goal, these organisations were also their own intellectual clearing houses, quasi-educational institutions where individuals were often introduced to the writings of critical theorists such as Edward Said and Jacqueline Rose for the first time, and debated the latest op-eds in the English edition of Israel's centre-left daily, Ha'aretz.

To American Jewish eyes, IJV appeared to be a similar organisation, albeit one with a distinctly literary hue. Arriving on the heels of the Lebanon war, and months of debate about Mearsheimer and Walt's Israel lobby article in the London Review of Books, and Jimmy Carter's book, Palestine Peace Not Apartheid, its timing couldn't have been better, particularly given that one of Independent Jewish Voices' founders (the aformentioned Rose), had made a name for herself in the US press for having been included in the Progressive Jewish Thought report (commissioned by the American Jewish Committee) in December 2006, in which a number of liberal Jewish intellectuals, like Rose, were classified as antisemites for taking critical positions on Israel.

Indeed, the pumps had been perfectly primed to make this new organisation the first internationally-recognised Jewish peace outfit. Even if Independent Jewish Voices never progressed beyond being a brief media event, at the very least, it would have been a surprisingly effective intervention in global Jewish discourse about the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. If the British community could give rise to such a profoundly pressing list of concerns and gain such dramatic notice, it might even portend a transformation of diaspora Jewry's relationship with Israel. The emergence of an Australian IJV group not long after the launch of the UK organisation did little to dampen that suspicion.

Published nearly two years after the February 2007 declaration announcing the formation of the organisation, the new book, A Time to Speak Out: Independent Jewish Voices on Israel, Zionism and Jewish Identity (published by Verso) ought to put to rest any concerns that IJV was opportunistically riding a wave of post-Lebanon war disaffection with Israel. Over the course of 300-plus pages, anthology editors Jacqueline Rose, Anne Karpf, Brian Klug and Barbara Rosenbaum manage to capture every major concern about Israel voiced by diaspora Jewish progressives since the Six-Day War in 1967. From Israel's impact on Jewish religious identity to the cultural crises currently being experienced by non-Israeli Jews, A Time to Speak Out makes every effort to explain what informs contemporary diaspora anxieties about Israel.

It is this explanatory quality that makes this book stand out. There is, despite the the consistent reiteration of Israel's well-documented transgressions against the Palestinians, an uncharacteristic air of fairness to the volume, one which attests to the impact the original pieces published by IJV members in Comment is Free first had. It does not provide excuses, so much as it rightfully renders what a complex picture diaspora Jewry's relationship with Israel actually is. Though the authors are critical and espouse unambiguous positions, for the most part they present their arguments in such a way as to transcend the tiresome didactics and cliched moralisms typical of much progressive writing on Israel. If what the editors wanted was to help promote real dialogue within the Jewish community and reach out to the unconverted, this will undoubtedly help facilitate it.

Considering how often diaspora Jewish liberals complain about being silenced when they raise questions about Israel's foreign policy, this alone is a remarkable achievement. To that end, the repeat descriptions, throughout the book, of the oppressive discursive environment of diaspora Jewry is absolutely invaluable, particularly in terms of how frequently Jewish anti-occupation activists contrast it to what takes place in Israeli politics and Israeli media. The Jewish diaspora is censorious, whereas Israel is ironically more free. A Time to Speak Out engineers a similarly free space for diaspora Jewry, without necessarily fetishising the Israeli example. Hence the sense among American Jews like my activist colleague that Independent Jewish Voices represented something much bigger than another group of foreign Jews wringing their hands over Israel's ill-treatment of the Palestinians – albeit with better publicity.